May 25 (Bloomberg) -- Bored with Damien Hirst? The signs
suggest that he is too.

For years, he has been trying to get away from the idioms
that made him famous -- pickled animals, paintings by
assistants, pharmaceutical cabinets.

The latest results of Hirst’s efforts to break out are on
show at White Cube, Bermondsey, in London: a series of old-fashioned oil paintings, all his own work, under the collective
title “Two Weeks One Summer” (through July 8, prices from
550,000 pounds, or $693,935, to 2 million pounds).

This escape attempt hasn’t worked either.

I’m sorry to say this because I think Hirst’s desire to
become a proper painter is admirable, and you have to be
impressed by his determination to press on despite some of the
most negative reviews in living memory. Nonetheless, the fact
remains: He may be an immensely famous artist, but as a painter
Hirst is a beginner.

This new batch of pictures has a quality that few would
have associated with him. They are sweet, as well as
incompetent. The genre is still life, sub-division memento mori.
In the 17th century, such pictures tended to dwell on the
transience of existence: Fruit and flowers, like all things,
pass and decay.

Juicy Blobs

This is familiar Hirst territory. He always has been keen
on decomposition. These pictures offer a pic’n’mix combination
of oranges, birds, flowers, butterflies plus some novel
elements: the trademark shark’s mouth, a background of his
signature dots and a pickled fetus in a jar. None of this --
even the contents of the pickle jar -- looks chilling, shocking
or even poignant. You are just conscious of bright colors and
juicy blobs of paint.

The problem is that Hirst is essentially what he always
protests he’s not: conceptual. He has a good grasp of the idea
of painting as a medium. But understanding the theory isn’t
enough. It’s no more good than an intellectual grasp of how to
play the violin; you also need the 10,000 hours of practice that
Malcolm Gladwell suggests are necessary to do anything well.

Hirst is trying to do it all too fast and too prolifically.
There are 35 of these pictures, yet only one thought among them,
and that’s a cliche.

Bridget Riley has one or two points in common with Hirst.
She was doing remarkable things with dots about the time he was
born in 1965, as can be seen in a splendid London loan
exhibition of her early paintings, prints and drawings at
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury St., SW1, and Karsten Schubert,
5-8 Lower John St., W1 (“Bridget Riley: Works 1960-66,”
through July 13).

Lines and Shapes

The difference is that while Hirst is currently failing to
get much of an effect with pickled babies in bottles, shark
jaws, etc., Riley in her early prime was able to create
tremendous pizzazz and a pervasive sense of existential unease
with just black lines and shapes on a white background.

When you look at a picture such as “Descending” (1965) or
“Crest” (1964), the whole world seems to pulse and heave
(early Riley is not recommended for sufferers from motion
sickness). Space itself seems to be twisting and compressing as
it might be on approaching a black hole.

The impact of Riley’s art depends, like all good painting,
on a finely honed sense of visual nuance. These pictures, as the
working drawings at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert reveal, were worked
on like precision engineering. That’s the kind of effort
required. Painting really well, Lucian Freud used to say, is
almost impossible. Just wanting to be a painter is not enough.